Advances in internet technology, social media, and smartphones have significantly changed how the global population communicates. Information pertaining to events occurring in one part of the world can be globally transmitted instantaneously. Yet, these emerging communication strategies have not been fully integrated with detection devices to simplify the detection process and enable global surveillance of pathogens, disease markers, contaminants, or other organic or inorganic targets of interest. In a disease-relevant example, much of the population in the world lives in resource-poor settings where emerging molecular detection systems are not available because of cost constraints, the need for stable and complex infrastructure, device size, and the requirement for skilled technicians to interpret the diagnostic results (1-3). Consequently, undiagnosed or misdiagnosed diseases can spread and become drug resistant, leading to economic burden, morbidity, and mortality. The integration of wireless communications devices such as smartphones—whose subscription reached over 5.9 billion worldwide in 2011 (4)—and tablets with state-of-the-art multiplexing detection devices would alleviate these problems and enable the real-time global surveillance of disease or contamination spread.
Thus far, “smart” mobile devices such as smartphones have only been used for imaging the test lines on lateral flow immunoassays, bacteria labeled with fluorophores, and tissue stains (5-7). These imaging techniques, however, cannot detect the early stages of infection or contamination because of poor analytical sensitivity and are incapable of detecting different strains or pathogens in a high throughput manner because of their inability to detect multiple biomarkers simultaneously. To overcome these limitations, there has been effort to combine cell phone technology with simple point-of-care devices such as lateral flow immunoassays and molecular pathology (4-8). But these techniques have poor analytical sensitivity and limited multiplexing capabilities. Despite the disclosures in the literature of combining smart phones and imaging techniques, there remains a greater challenge in coupling wireless communication device technology such as smartphones and tablets with more complex target detection schemes that can increase the throughput of the detection process and are capable of simultaneously detecting multiple targets such as pathogen or contaminant strains or mutations.
One example of barcode technology, quantum dot (QD) barcode technology, is versatile in molecular detection and can detect a variety of targets, including both genomic or proteomic targets (12-14). Each barcode may include a unique optical signature due to the incorporation of different emitting QDs within, for example, a microbead to create a barcode. The barcode is then conjugated with a ligand that can specifically bind to and recognize a target of interest, such as a molecule, pathogen marker, a contaminant, or a whole pathogen. Whereas the barcode (the primary label) identifies the target of interest, the binding of a secondary label onto the target indicates the successful capture of the target by the barcode ligand. An optical signature comprised of the primary label/barcode signal and the secondary label signal indicates positive detection of the target of interest from a sample. A challenge to using these barcodes in point-of-care detection is that a skilled technician is required to run the assay because subtle differences in microbead number, incubation time, and microbead stability can influence the analytical performance. The ability to assemble these barcodes on a chip would alleviate these problems. Microbeads assembled on a chip are currently used in sequencing analysis but the cost of the final chip is high because the microbeads are assembled on the ends of optical fibers (15). Therefore, current assembling techniques of fluorescent microbeads are not cost-effective for conventional detection applications in remote or resource-limited settings.
There are currently no systems that combine wireless communications devices with barcoding technology that can effectively detect multiple targets of interest simultaneously. In particular, there is currently no system that combines wireless communications devices with barcoding technology that can effectively and simultaneously detect multiple contaminants or pathogens and differentiate between contaminants or species of pathogens. Therefore, one objective of the present invention is to provide a system that combines barcoding technology and portable wireless communications device technology to simultaneously detect multiple targets such as contaminants, disease markers, pathogens, mutations, peptides, genomic targets, polysaccharides and other organic or inorganic targets that may be of interest.
A further object of the invention is to provide a system and method that combine portable wireless communication device technology and barcode technology and that the system and method are suitable for collecting information from a sample, analyzing the information and using the analysis to simultaneously identify multiple targets of interest.
A further object of the invention is to provide a system and method that combine portable wireless communication device technology and barcode technology and that the system and method are capable of transmitting the collected information wirelessly to a remote site for storage or further analysis of the information.
Further and other objects of the invention will be realized from the following Summary of the Invention, the Discussion of the Invention and the embodiments and Examples thereof.